Just after midday on Saturday, Travis Kukull slipped a key into the lock at 37 Blacksmith Street in Ft. Seward and let himself into the dark kitchen at the back of the building.
“It’s a pretty well set up restaurant,” he said as he maneuvered around steel tables, coolers and ovens. “There’s a lot of things in here that I could use to get going really fast.”
He’s walking through what was once the popular Fireweed pizza restaurant. Owner Sarah Jaymot announced in March that she would not reopen the place for the summer saying she could not get her landlords – the Port Chilkoot Company – to repair the leaky roof on the building.
There’s still some visible water damage in the kitchen, due to a leak in the roof. But Kukull points it out as he walks through and say it’s not too major.
“I’ve been checking on the place pretty regularly to make sure that’s not continuing,” Kukull said. He said he just finished negotiating a lease with the Port Chilkoot Company and said it contains a provision that they must repair the roof of the building within two years.
It’s the third, or maybe fourth time he’s considered buying the space. But then again Kukull, who owned and operated two other restaurants in Seattle, said that’s about how many times he’s considered buying every single space that exists in Haines.
“I don’t get discouraged very easily by stuff when it doesn’t work out,” he said.
He plans to call the new 2,400 square foot space Deer Heart, named after a plant at the center of an Edible Alaska article by Bjorn Dihle who noticed deer heart plants being eaten by a deer he had successfully killed on a hunt.
“It was a very touching article and it kind of stuck with me,” Kukull said.
The plant is ubiquitous in Southeast, Alaska and makes a good, strongly-flavored salad green.
“This is such an unassuming plant that is so abundant and delicious and nobody eats it,” he said. “That’s… everything I’m about.”
Kukull said he used to forage for greens just like it in Seattle, going on walks with his dog, loading up garbage bags with miner’s lettuce and wild watercress, taking it to his restaurant and mixing it into the salad.
“I think doing stuff like that, you know, really shows people that there’s more resiliency here than what they previously thought, and they don’t need to rely so much on everything being shipped in so and especially with that, a plant like that, it’s literally everywhere, and there’s so much of it,” he said.
There’s an additional 400 square feet in the basement Kukull said he plans to use for his catering business and for processing subsistence foods.
“That’s one thing that people in Haines are good at. They may not be good line cooks yet, but they’re good at putting food away,” he said.
Sarah Jaymot, the outgoing owner of the Fireweed, said she’s glad to hear that Kukull had worked out the terms of the lease with the people running Fort Seward.
“Hopefully we can finally move forward with the sale of the restaurant and the business assets,” she wrote in an email.
Jaymot said she wants everyone who ate at the Fireweed to know how much she appreciates all of the love and support.
“Our 2023 was a highlight of my career,” she said. “I look forward to the reopening of a beloved community establishment, wishing the new owner all the best.”
For now, Kukull said he plans to open in the early spring and mirror the hours of the distillery across the street – Thursday, Friday, Saturday. He’d like to keep it open year round, but that also means figuring out staffing, which has been a challenge for many local businesses.
Kukull said he’s hoping to cultivate skilled people in the Chilkat Valley to staff his restaurant, but is a little worried about finding the right people, particularly to work in the kitchen.
“Staffing is going to be a real thing. So that’s probably going to be one of my biggest hurdles,” he said. “It’s going to be hard the first summer, but I think if I can kind of build on it every single year. I‘ve seen other chefs do that in remote areas, and people want to learn that stuff.”